View PDF

Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below.

This essay addresses the remarkable perseverance of Mormon polygamy.I argue that its survival is chiefly explained by the emphasis it was given in the nineteenth-century Church. The cardinal significance early leaders granted plurality in their teachings, combined with spirited defenses in its behalf, so gilded the doctrine that its enduring attraction was assured. A great deal of research studying patriarchal marriage has occurred in the last thirty or so years. The history of Mormon polygamy rehearsed in this paper selectively appropriates that work, together with early Latter-day Saint discourse, to more fully exhibit the bright promise given plural marriage by the Church’s founding generations. I will also recount the Saints’ torturous detachment from the practice and, further supporting the paper’s theme, summarize fundamentalist efforts to maintain a continuum with Mormonism’s polygamous past. Finally, the essay concludes with comments of the implications for the persistence of plural marriage for official Mormonism and American society today. 

Anxious that there be no doubt concerning their commitment to the monogamous home, contemporary spokesmen of the orthodox Church repeatedly issue firmly worded communiqués denying that their organization approves polygamous marriage or has any formal connection either with Mormon fundamentalists or other communities that do. In what is probably the most-often referenced statement of that kind, Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, in an interview with Larry King on CNN in 1998, said that the information he possessed was that only 2 to 5 percent of the Saints engaged in plural marriage, but added that it was a long time ago, was not now doctrinal, and was ended in 1890. Hinckley went on to condemn its contemporary practice, emphasizing that it was illegal. Such statements are repeated on the internet and elsewhere by Church representatives who also seek to secure the use of “Mormon” exclusively for the mainline, monogamous denomination. 

By attempting to distance the Church from modern polygamous sects, however, official spokesmen obscure much of what we now know about the Church’s involvement with plural marriage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Statements such as Hinckley’s constitute a glossed appropriation of Mormon history. Not only do they minimize the number of participants involved when Mormonism did approve polygamy, but they also fail to acknowledge that what fundamentalists seek is reinstatement of a practice once counted by the Saints as among their most important. Only by recalling the imposing role given polygamy in the early Church can we understand efforts presently made by communities in Utah, Texas, and elsewhere to renew it. From the time of its first appearance in the nineteenth century, through the long but failed Latter-day Saint effort to win tolerance for polygamy, and now with fundamentalist reiteration, plural marriage displays a tenacious, reclaiming tendency—notwithstanding determined efforts to repress and forget it by the Church that gave it birth. 

I 

While questions remain concerning the role of Joseph Smith’s social/sexual motivations in commencing the practice, the most compelling theological assumptions supporting plural marriage are found in teachings that evolved contemporaneously with it, doctrines still accepted as revealed truth by the Church today. These tenets contend that God once passed through a probationary existence similar to our own. By faithful behavior, He eventually acquired attributes of omnipotence and supernal majesty. And, the Prophet taught, all humankind could aspire to a similar metamorphosis.One of the requirements, however, most completely set forth in Smith’s 1843 revelation on the subject, was that couples must marry and be “sealed” to each other in eternal unions, rituals performed by Church authorities today. Closely connected to this concept, and integral to the revelation as an answer to Smith’s question about why ancient patriarchs married multiple women, the Prophet was told that Abraham and others like him did so with divine permission that they might aggrandize their family estates through eternity. Both God Almighty and His faithful servants in those early days, the Prophet was instructed, took immense, even preeminent reward from the propagation of their kind (D&C 132:30–31, 55, 63). 

Smith was told that plurality so lifted such worthies that they sat “on thrones, and are not angels but are gods.” And in language unexcelled in an age flowing with grandiosities, Smith said he was promised that God would “bless him, and multiply him, and give unto him an hundred fold in this world of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, houses and lands, wives and children, and crowns of eternal life” (D&C 132:37, 55 passim). Benjamin F. Johnson, a close associate of the Church’s founder, explained: “Dominion & Powr in the great Future would be commensurate with the no of Wives childin & Friends that we inheret here and that our great mission to earth . . . [is] to Organize a Neculi of Heaven to take with us.”Gary Bergera perfectly summarized the concept: “For Smith, plural marriage represented the pinnacle of his theology of exaltation: the husband as king and priest, surrounded by queens and priestesses eternally procreating spirit children. As these spirit offspring enter mortality, they, by their obedience, accrue both to themselves, through their own children, and to their eternal parents additional glory, power, and exaltation—the entire process of exaltation cycling forever worlds without end.” 

So justified, the Prophet and several of his disciples conformed their lives to heaven’s word. Smith’s devotion to the practice was so great that the most recent investigation of his plural marriages counts them at over thirty-five and indicates that, before his assassination, he invited between two and three dozen other men to similarly enlarge their families. The vigor displayed by the Prophet and his confidants in forming such relationships resulted in scores of women being taken into the arms of men committed to the arrangement.More than one of his associates commented that none was more active in such ventures than the Prophet himself. A nephew and later Church president, Joseph F. Smith, struck by his uncle’s zeal in acquiring new wives, recalled it as proof of the importance Mormonism’s founder attached to the doctrine. 

Such activities inevitably brought scandal, arousing opposition in and outside the Church, inviting condemnation of such intimacies as no more than “abominations and whoredoms.”And this, combined with other difficulties, fed the whorl of events culminating in the murders of Joseph and his brother Hyrum. There may have been overstatement in Sidney Rigdon’s claim that plural marriage was “the thing which put them into the power of their enemies, and was the immediate cause of their death.” But it was a slight exaggeration only. 

Violence seemed to steel Mormon conviction. In the years immediately following the Smiths’ assassinations and during the Saints’ hegira to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, polygamous unions were formed in increasing numbers.After their arrival, believing that vast plains and high mountains insulated them from persecution, the Mormons did little to conceal their enlarging households. Consequently, reports from forty-niners, non-Mormon government officials, and other itinerant “Gentiles” brought criticism, prompting Latter-day Saint authorities to fearlessly defend their new family order. And once launched, Mormon support for the Principle quickly assumed a surprisingly forthright character. In an 1852 address, described by Harold Bloom as “the most courageous act of spiritual defiance in all American history,”at Brigham Young’s invitation Apostle Orson Pratt asserted that the marriage of Mormon men to several wives was approved by the Bible. Mormon behavior, he said, was a heaven-inspired replication of deeds undertaken by father Abraham.An other apostle, Orson Spencer, in a pamphlet so valued by the Saints that they later included it in a time deposit in the nearly completed Salt Lake Temple, said if he had the voice of a trumpet he would call on congresses and parliaments everywhere to hear ken to the saving qualities of “this one great foundation of society,” the Abrahamic polygamous household.And in an address to the territorial legislature in 1855, Apostle Parley P. Pratt, Orson’s older brother, urged that monogamy, with the laws supporting it, be “cast into the depths of the sea,” like a “millstone,” and there left to “sink with Great Babylon to rise no more.” Not only Utah Territory, Pratt said, but all human societies could endure only if they approved patriarchal homes emulating that of Abraham with his plurality of wives. 

An important strain in this anthem, one voiced by other religious reformers of the early nineteenth-century, was distrust for what Sidney Ahlstrom described as the “historical tradition[s] and accretions” of established Christianity.Mormon founder Joseph Smith Jr. said that God told him Christendom had fallen away from the teachings of the primitive Church and from commandments given in earlier dispensations of Judeo-Christian history.Consistent with the claim, Mormons faulted Catholics and Protestants for encouraging marriage doctrines that the Saints said led invariably to sexual immorality. By praising celibacy and approving monogamy, Mormons contended, not only had Christians departed from Jewish polygamous practice but by doing so had sown prostitution, adultery, and sexual decadence throughout the modern world. “The principal abominations upon the face of the earth,” said an 1853 editorial in Mormonism’s Millennial Star, were the product of marital practices introduced by Catholicism and persevered in by its Protestant offspring. Hence, it was said, “men must either take sides with the mother of harlots, and with her monogamy, and celibacy, and prostitution, or take sides with the Almighty, and with His holy law of polygamy, and sexual purity.” 

Carrying the argument of apostasy to its furthest extent, the Saints said that the rest of Christendom had turned away from the example of Jesus himself who, like God the Father, was both married and likely a polygamist.It was to be expected that the Saints would seek to mirror their deities. A primary theme running through the revelation of 1843 was that, by marrying multiple wives and producing numerous offspring, the faithful not only magnified the glory of God but qualified themselves to stand with Him, His Son, and others who had earned the Almighty’s favor, adding to and enlarging the exaltation of all. While many non-Mormon observers thought it a pagan heresy to say heaven was full of gods, to insist that they also joined with multitudes of female divinities in eternal, reproductive coupling seemed nothing less than blasphemous.Nevertheless, Latter-day Saint advocates of plurality have, both in the early Church and among fundamentalists today, rooted their justifications for its employment in descriptions of heaven’s pantheon as family-centered and patriarchal—as a place where countless progeny, peopling and multiplying worlds, compound one’s glory to infinity. 

The Saints quickly developed additional arguments to recommend the system. One of these, only recently recognized for the importance it carried in nineteenth-century Mormon thought, was the claim that, if practiced as taught by their leaders, plural marriage would produce a generation of stronger, longer-living men and women, procuring for them the longevity of the ancients while saving their descendants from biological failings entailed by the alleged excesses of monogamy. By confining sexual intercourse to reproductive intent, the marriage of one man to several women accommodated greater male libidinous need within domestic boundaries while, at the same time, accomplishing the species’ regenerative requirement and avoiding the dissipating, non-reproductive indulgences that Mormons believed sullied the monogamous bed.As late as 1885, despite the grip of federal anti-polygamy laws, First Presidency members unequivocally identified monogamy with contemporary biological and social ills. Legally confining men to one spouse, they said, was not “God’s system.” For monogamy “did not meet man’s wants. Those channels which God has provided for the lawful exercise of the appetites with which He has endowed man, under the system now in vogue, have been dammed up, and the history of Christianity informs us with what terrible results—the degradation and prostitution of woman, and the spread of the most terrible scourge known to humanity, the social evil, with its train of loathsome horrors. With our knowledge of God’s laws we never can adopt such a system and call it civilization.” 

Almost entirely forgotten by the modern Church, nineteenth-century Mormon advocates of polygamy were certain the practice could rejuvenate the species. One polygamous wife, repeating the teachings of her leaders, told a visitor to Utah in 1880 that polygamy was “given for the regeneration of humankind. There are no healthier, or better developed children than those born in polygamy.”George Q. Cannon said that, by obeying God’s revelation approving plural marriage, Mormon offspring were becoming “healthy and vigorous,” and were fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah that God’s people would live to the age of a tree.It was an anticipation repeated by others. Charles W. Penrose, a Mormon newspaper editor who became an apostle in 1904, told how “celestial marriage, called by the world polygamy,” was giving rise among the Latter-day Saints to “stalwart sons and fair and robust daughters. . . . The mountain boys of Utah, powerful and well developed . . . are the first fruits of the Lord’s great work of regeneration.” 

Beyond its health-giving powers, plurality was recommended as a way to care for socially and economically marginalized females such as orphans, widows, or those enfeebled by age.It also, said the Saints, made for happier households than monogamy.It reinforced male authority in the home, restoring the domestic pattern of the ancient patriarchs and providing a remedy for what some believed was a serious structural ailment in the nineteenth-century family.Altogether, plural marriage was held out as a tonic. In the words of Luke William Gallup, not then a polygamist but an advocate of the doctrine, those who practice plural marriage “are rewarded, becoming healthy & strong, and the Man who observes this & marries more than one wife for the sake of posterity will lengthen out his days, enjoying a long life & a happy one.”Or as Charles Smith, who entered the Principle, put it to a yet-one-wifed friend: “I wish you were a polyomist [sic] there is Something immensely Godlike in it[.] It increases the powers of the mind, [and] brings forth inbolden relief all the powers of the human Soul.”The Mormon husband of two or more wives, another enthusiast said, did more for the race than “ten thousand monogamists who write and preach about morality and virtue.” 

Finally, the Saints were often told that only by entering plural marriage could they reach the highest level of glory in the next life. Eternal marriage and plurality of wives were inextricably connected. To forfeit one, it was said, would bring loss of the other. The 1843 revelation was placed in the Doctrine and Covenants in 1876 to buttress the contention of George Reynolds, then under indictment, that plural marriage was a commandment, a way of life required of him by his religion. By identifying the practice as a mandate imposed by Mormon doctrine, it was hoped that implementation of the Principle would find protection under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Daniel H. Wells, a counselor to President Brigham Young, in support of Reynolds, stated in open court that any who were physically able to enter the order but failed to do so “would be under condemnation, and would be clipped in their glory in the world to come.”As Brigham Young once put it, all should at least have faith in the doctrine and not oppose it, for “the only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.” 

And this, the prospective meed of godly thrones, combined with plurality’s temporal gifts, illustrates the compelling sweep of expectations that nineteenth-century Mormons were told they could look for if they lived the Principle. One modern writer, puzzling over why Latter-day Saints undertook such emotionally challenging marriages, concluded that it could only have been from unquestioning obedience to God’s inscrutable command.On the contrary, Church authorities told their followers that plural marriage brought unnumbered compensations, here as well as in the life to come. In the words of nineteenth-century apostle Orson Hyde, polygamy was supported by “such a tide of irresistible arguments, that, like the grand Mississippi, it bears on its bold current everything that dares to oppose its course.” 

Because of its transforming effects, plurality was said to have produced an unusual number of men raised to leadership in the Church and that its ethos resulted in an especially righteous and able generation of members.Polygamy, some contended, would eventually be counted a blessing to everyone. Whether this meant that the Saints should engage in it only by themselves, leavening the social loaf through their polygamous practice alone, or whether it was a system suitable for humankind generally, was answered differently at different times. Especially when refuting charges that the Church sought to disseminate its domestic reform abroad, leaders emphatically denied that they intended doing so. It was, said Brigham Young, a commandment given by God only for his “faithful children.”Heber C. Kimball described the practice as a means by which the Almighty intended to keep the Saints separate and distinct from the rest of the world.Plurality, one Latter-day Saint pamphleteer stated, was to be confined geographically to Zion, a place intentionally set apart by God for that purpose.And President John Taylor was told in a revelation that plurality was not to be proclaimed to nor urged upon the rest of the world unless they first accepted the “law of my Gospel and are governed thereby.” 

Nevertheless, moved by the lifting capacities claimed for patriarchal marriage, soaring expectations concerning its acknowledgment, if not its practice outside the Mormon fold, were also heard. After Orson Pratt’s intrepid 1852 sermon, Brigham Young followed Pratt by predicting that the Principle would be accepted by “the more intelligent portions of the world” and praised as one of the best doctrines ever set forth.Rather than an innovation, it was described as an ancient family pattern superior to the monogamy of modern Christian nations, one yet to be seen in non-Euro-American societies. George Q. Cannon asserted that a survey of these cultures proved polygamy, though practiced by peoples unfamiliar with Mormonism, brought “greater good to them than the practice of monogamy or the one-wife system.” Thus, said another authority, echoing plurality’s alleged eugenic effects, “the most stalwart and physically powerful men known are not found in Christian monogamic nations, but in polygamic Asia.” 

Mormon confidence in the superiority of plural marriage sometimes partook of a near hauteur. It was more than once described as their Church’s “greatest gift” to humankind.As late as the mid-1880s, when the national anti-polygamy crusade was near its height, Apostle Moses Thatcher reaffirmed that a major reason the Saints refused to give up polygamy was because, in his words, it was the “chief corner stone” by which they would establish a civilization “that will yet be the admiration of the world.” Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, writing near the same time, said Mormons were honored that the Almighty had chosen them to pioneer a domestic pattern that would bring greater health and happiness and that Mormons were the “advanced guard” for introducing this “practical reform in the marriage system.”Boasting that the Saints had the handsomest men and women, Apostle George A. Smith said this was because they better understood the correct relationship of the sexes and that Gentiles might properly envy them, for such unbelievers were “a poor, narrow-minded, pinch-backed race of men, who chain themselves down to the law of monogamy.”On account of their teachings, relocating to the valleys of the mountains was, a female Saint remembered, like “passing from one World to another!”And a Mormon physician and polygamous wife promised that, if plurality were universally accepted as taught by the Saints, the millennium would come. 

Owing to such enthusiasm, we know plurality was practiced to a greater extent than traditional Church estimates admit. Though the number of pluralists after 1860 declined relative to the entire population of the Church, inquiries into the question find that, on average, between a fourth and a third of households in pre-Manifesto, Mormon Utah could be counted as polygamous; settlements with even higher proportions existed but were exceptional.As Lowell “Ben” Bennion, the foremost investigator of these matters, has suggested, even these percentages might have been larger except for demographic and other constraints, such as the number of eligible females. Beyond this, owing to their ex tensive social networks, most Mormons were closely connected in one way or another with friends and relatives who were pluralists. Because so many Church leaders were polygamous, an imprimatur that reinforced the doctrine’s importance, the mindset of Mormons both plural and monogamous was one that gave the Principle an august presence in their communities.In a recent survey, Bennion and co-author Thomas R. Carter conclude that plural marriage, in all its aspects, “was prevalent enough to label Utah polygamous in spite of its monogamous majority.” 

Over the half century or more of Church approval for plurality, tens of thousands of men, women, and children lived beneath the roofs of Mormon Abrahams.As such, excepting religious celibacy, the Mormon polygamous experience as a religio-cultural ideal as well as actual way of life, may have constituted the largest formal departure from monogamy in western European and American societies for centuries. After a visit to the American West, former Vice President Schuyler Colfax complained to Senator George Edmunds in 1882 that the Principle was so broadly embraced in Utah that he found monogamous Mormons committed to it just as poor whites in the South supported slavery.With its theological prestige and socially suffused character, the comment of one adherent at the time of the national crusade against the practice is entirely comprehensible: “The ABANDONMENT OF POLYGAMY, that is considered by some to be so easy of accomplishment, is more untenable even than fighting. However much the people might desire to do this, they could not without yielding every other principle, for it is the very keystone of our faith, and is so closely interwoven into everything that pertains to our religion, that to tear it asunder and cast it away would involve the entire structure.” 

II 

The energy Latter-day Saints brought to the support of their doctrine also explains the voltaic character of non-Mormon response. Sir Richard Burton commented on the level of passion displayed by the two sides in the debate over Mormon claims. And Richard D. Poll, a twentieth-century Mormon historian, pointed out that attacks on the Saints and their polygamy were largely proportional to the intensity of Mormon attacks on the Gentiles and their monogamy.The reaction of those opposing plurality was owing to widespread belief that, rather than what Latter-day Saints were saying, it was monogamous marriage that accounted for what was best in Western civilization. Ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan said in the 1870s that monogamy was an evolved form, winnowed and proven superior to other marital arrangements by experience.If polygamy were tolerated, it was believed, civility would regress, the status of women would decline, the nation’s democratic sensibilities would erode, and rank immorality would spread. As non-Mormon Americans enveloped the Mountain West, the Saints were predictably challenged by antagonists who insisted that monogamy alone could bring a happy and ordered society. 

Moved by such views, congressmen began enacting successively harsher statutes to suppress polygamy beginning in 1862, eventually patterning their laws on Reconstruction measures imposed on former Confederate states and subjecting Utah society to the political and judicial control of a federal commission. Mormon insistence that the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution permitted them to configure marriage relations as they pleased was contradicted by the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous Reynolds case of 1879. In its decision, while affirming the authority of Congress to regulate marriage in territories such as Utah and establishing the rule that liberty under the First Amendment extended only to religious belief, not practice, the court also affirmed that “polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Eu rope, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people.” 

Sarah Barringer Gordon has shown that the campaign against polygamy, among other things, rested on suppositions knitting the nuclear family and the American Constitution together. For many, this alliance was anchored in the traditional, Protestant monogamous home. It was the presumed threat to monogamy, more than all else, that raised vehement opposition to plural marriage and moved the nation’s reformist focus from Reconstruction in the South to Reconstruction in the West.As expressed by the Utah Commission in its report for 1885, the nation’s anti-polygamy laws and imprisonment of Mormon pluralists occurred because of “the assault made by the Mormon Church upon the most cherished institution of our civilization—the monogamous system. The laws for the suppression of polygamy were chiefly inspired by the apprehension that if this practice should be … tolerated. . . in the United States it might one day become a serious menace to the institution of monogamy, which the world has come to consider the most potential factor for the advancement of civilization everywhere.” 

Exercising authority given them by Congress, law-enforcement officers arrested so many “cohabs” that western prisons filled, making it necessary to incarcerate some as far east as Detroit, Michigan.In addition to the imprisonment of Church members by the hundreds and loss of properties, scores fled across the nation’s boundaries, establishing colonies in Mexico and Canada where they looked to freely cultivate what George Alfred Townsend described as the “banyan” redundancies of Mormon polygamy.Most onerous, perhaps, anticipating representations made of today’s fundamentalists, were exaggerated portrayals of Mormon plural marriage as nothing more than a system encouraging the lustful exploitation of women and young girls. Fear that Mormons threatened traditional family life inspired an unsuccessful but decades-long national campaign to amend the U.S. Constitution and so forever prohibit polygamy.International attention to “Mormon marriages,” as they were sometimes called, led to legislation outlawing polygamy in Canada, anti-Mormon pamphleteering in Europe, and condemnation by the Pope.In the words of one observer at the time, Hubert Howe Bancroft, the federal crusade against Mormon polygamy was a program “without parallel in the history of American morals.” 

Though unrelenting, attacks on plurality were slow to extinguish Mormon attachment to the doctrine. The onslaught brought by their enemies seemed only to spur greater animation by defenders. As Mary Jane Mount Tanner put it to a family member in 1882, “Aunt Cornelia says why do I defend polygamy so strongly I tell her because she attacts it.”Tempering their advocacy, Mormon leaders insisted they were not “propagandists” and had never actively sought universal adherence to “Bible marriage.”At the same time, referring to the transforming power of plurality, those arrayed against them were, said Charles W. Penrose, seeking to “destroy the work of regeneration and reformation” Mormonism had brought to the world.Further, Eliza R. Snow warned that those seeking to forcefully engraft monogamy on them would not only be divinely punished but, if they succeeded in making the Latter-day Saints forfeit polygamy, would bear a greater burden before God than any people except the ancient Jews.They were, said the leaders, in circumstances similar to those of the Israelites in Egypt and the early Christians under Rome.Church members were hated by the world, they were told, just as the righteous in every age had been. And fueling that “hate,” said George Q. Cannon, “head and front,” was Mormon audacity in urging plural marriage as a principle of religion. 

Still, the Saints were assured, if they would hold fast to the practice, keeping “every commandment,” that God would stand as their protector—a contractual obligation that some later said the Saints failed completely to fulfill, thus explaining why the Lord eventually took plural marriage away from them with the Manifesto.But as part of this penultimate phase of the struggle, believers were told that the campaign against polygamy was a dimension of the long-expected persecution and upheaval expected to precede the world’s end. This vision was often communicated to the Saints by their leaders, explaining that, if they endured, Mormon suffering brought by their enemies would be assuaged by terrible reckoning at the hand of God.That is why, until the late 1880s when the Church became especially committed to projecting a reformed image of itself so as to win statehood for Utah and thereby acquire greater autonomy from federal control, leaders said that allegiance to polygamy was more important than obedience to secular laws criminalizing the practice.Too much smoothed from Mormon memory today, efforts by the Saints to perpetuate the “higher law,” submitting to humiliation, impoverishment, dislocation, and imprisonment, were heroic. Their per severance constitutes one of the longest instances of civil disobedience in United States history. 

As the bite of anti-polygamy legislation was more keenly felt, Church spokesmen bent their defensive strategy, projecting the Mormon image as overwhelmingly monogamous, hoping thereby to persuade the nation that they were little different from other Americans in their home life. A major feature of this tack involved shuttering the Church’s devotion to plural marriage from public view while abating their criticism of traditional monogamy. In 1888 Wilford Woodruff told General Authority colleagues that, if anyone should commence talking about plurality at a general conference, they should throw their hats at him. 

Church representatives attempted to persuade the government that the practice was nearly moribund, saying that the proportion of Latter-day Saints engaged in polygamy amounted to no more than 1 or 2 percent, and that those numbers were “diminishing with wonderful rapidity.”At the same time, not only was approval for such marriages still given but, especially when speaking privately and within Church walls, authorities yet told members that the practice was essential for their highest exaltation in the hereafter and urged its observance.Alarmed by their leaders’ public statements and fearing that a retreat in Church policy on polygamy was underway, Mormons serving time in prison complained to George Q. Cannon, a counselor in the First Presidency, that if this were true their sacrifices for the doctrine were in vain. Cannon assured them on October 2, 1888, that polygamy would not be given up.Recognizing the Janus-like character of its response to the nation’s campaign against Mormonism’s marital ideal in the 1880s, especially in the last few years of that decade, helps us better understand how the Church could issue the 1890 Manifesto and yet continue to approve new plural marriages for the next quarter century. 

When in 1890 the Utah Commission impugned Mormon denials by announcing the discovery of dozens of recently solemnized polygamous unions and accused the Church of continuing to urge the doctrine, President Woodruff issued his famous Manifesto the week before October general conference. Consistent with what one critic called Mormonism’s “wooden horse” tactic of seeking entry into the Union by publicly denying authorization of plural marriages while actually permitting them, Woodruff stamped the commission’s allegations as false. He further declared his intent to personally submit to the laws of the land and “advised” other Latter-day Saints to do likewise.The Mormon president indicated in his journal that he prepared the Manifesto to obtain “the Temporal Salvation of the Church.”And this was what the finished document, with its denials, genuflections to the law, and non-revelatory tone eventually accomplished. Consistent with earlier professions, using feint and circumvention, the object was to show federal lawmakers that they were advising members not to enter polygamous marriages, hoping thereby to obtain relief from the enforcement of anti-bigamy statutes, acquire statehood, but keep the Principle. 

When it was learned that Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble, to whom a copy of Woodruff’s statement had already been sent, would not accept it as persuasive unless ratified by Church members themselves, it was read and voted upon at a session of general conference, October 6, 1890. This was a significant step because members were now not only advised to obey the law but, by voting on the document, were making their obedience a rule of the Church. Although, in a statement following publication of the Manifesto as “Official Declaration–1” in contemporary editions of the Doctrine and Covenants, the vote on the Manifesto is reported to have been unanimous, it was not. Some of those present were deeply disturbed by the presentation. Nevertheless, enough lifted their hands that the statement passed and became official policy for the Church. 

Woodruff’s pronouncement, however, failed to address several important matters relating to Mormon plural marriage. Were men and women who married as plurals before the document’s issuance, for example, affected by its language and now to be separated?Was the proclamation applicable outside the United States, as in Mexico where dozens of plural families resided? And what implications did the document have for Mormon men then prosecuted or serving time for polygamous cohabitation? 

None of these questions, however, proved so controversial as: Was the Manifesto a revelation? As already indicated, except that it was voted upon and made official policy, Woodruff’s pronouncement differed little from other carefully worded retractions issued by the Church for years. Beyond this, nothing in its language resembled the style and form of revelations given by Church leaders in the past, including Woodruff’s own of a decade before, in which the Almighty told him the nation would be punished for attempting to keep the Saints from “obeying the Patriarchal Law of Abraham which leadeth to a Celestial Glory.”When a Utah Commissioner said the Manifesto would have been more effective if it had been presented as a revelation, he was reproached by the editor of the Church’s official newspaper who stated that when word came from on high it would be soon enough for the Church’s president to say so.Dissatisfaction on the question within, as well as outside of, the Church continued. Consequently, building on remarks made at the time of its presentation, President Woodruff was brought to affirm that the document was revealed and was a commandment from God.More than this, in the 1891 hearings before the Master in Chancery dealing with escheated Church properties, the Church president, somewhat unwillingly, was led to say that his declaration required Mormon adherence to all provisions of the law of the land, including the need to discontinue living with plural wives married before the Manifesto, and that anyone entering a new plural marriage would be “liable to excommunication.” 

Still, authorities see-sawed over the question for years. Disagreement on the matter fractured the Church’s governing quorums. Some opposed permitting new polygamous marriages. Others remained strongly committed to the Principle and secretly assisted faithful members wishing to take new wives into their homes. Supporting those who saw Woodruff’s declaration as but a repetition of Church pretense in the 1880s was Apostle Marriner W. Merrill, one of those whom Woodruff consulted when the document was prepared. He said: “I do Not believe the Manifesto was a revelation from God but was formulated by Prest. Woodruff and endorsed by His Councilors and the Twelve Apostles for expediency to meet the present situation of affairs in the Nation or those against the Church.”Another apostle boldly stated in 1900 that the propagation of polygamous offspring would continue until the second coming of the Savior, adding, “I make this prophecy in the name of Jesus Christ.”So far as deceit in the Church’s maneuverings is concerned, there was the alleged justifying remark of Apostle John Henry Smith that the Manifesto was but “a trick to beat the devil at his own game.”It is significant that not only did those passages of the 1843 revelation commanding polygamy remain unchanged in the Doctrine and Covenants but also the Manifesto itself was not included in that canon until eighteen years after its formal presentation—and then, titled only an “Official Declaration,” was placed so far to the rear of the book that it followed both the index and concordance. 

Whatever qualifications are raised concerning it, the Manifesto and its interpretive development ushered the Church into an era of unprecedented agreement with the nation. Utah’s territorial legislature in 1892, after nearly a half-century of refusal to do so, criminalized polygamous cohabitation.The arrest and jailing of Mormon polygamists largely came to an end. Mormons aligned themselves with national political parties, and Utah Territory in 1896 was granted full membership with other states in the Union. Most importantly, public statements by leaders that new polygamous marriages were no longer condoned were repeated with increasing frequency, acquiring more credibility with members and nonmembers alike. Many who had long been critical of the Church were persuaded that the Saints had made a genuine concession, had turned away from plural marriage, and were now a fully American people. 

This said, nothing so speaks to the depth of the polygamous current in Mormon culture as the continued performance of new plural marriages during the 1890s and after, the Manifesto and promises by Church leaders notwithstanding. When word of such late unions emerged, Mormon spokesmen said they were the work of rebels and were few in number. Research shows, however, that high Church leaders, including members of the First Presidency, gave permission for many of these marriages, that they numbered in the hundreds, and that most who took additional wives in the quarter century after the Manifesto could be described as among the most faithful in the Church. At least seven Apostles took new plural wives after Woodruff’s 1890 declaration.Churchmen did all they could to cloak such marriages from the majority of believers as well as outsiders, employing obfuscation, deception, and mistruth. What lay beneath this subterranean extension was the memory of strong commitments to “the higher law,” commitments made again and again in holy places, memory of heroic sacrifices made in behalf of the Principle, sacrifices against which they were fortified not only by assurances that God would preserve both them and plural marriage but by the bold promise of polygamy’s extraordinary rewards. 

At the same time as officially approved post-Manifesto plural unions were occurring, the impetus of reform, both in fact and appearance, grew. Efforts to reconfigure the Church were energized by embarrassments arising from the B. H. Roberts and Reed Smoot cases in Congress. Roberts, who lived in a plural household and may have taken an additional spouse after the Manifesto, owing to vigorous criticism in both Congress and the nation’s press, was refused his seat in the House of Representatives in 1900.In the wake of this episode, with revived suspicion concerning Mormon truthfulness in the air, Utah’s Senator-Apostle Reed Smoot was elected and seated but challenged. This four-year-long senatorial inquiry, one of the longest in congressional history to that time, while acquitting Smoot of marrying additional women, demonstrated that numbers of others, including Church authorities, had taken new brides and lived with them as plural wives since the 1890 Manifesto.The awkward nature of these discoveries, abetted by urgings from Senator Smoot, persuaded President Joseph F. Smith to again strongly deny Mormon approval of plural marriage in 1904 and more resolutely halter other leaders in bringing the performance of such marriages to an end. 

In addition to public disavowals of polygamous relationships, a committee of apostles chaired by Francis M. Lyman, the quo rum president, undertook the investigation of cases rumored to involve such unions.But signals from the leaders remained confusing. After delivering a firm address condemning new plural marriages at general conference in April 1914, for example, President Smith hosted an entertainment the same evening honoring those who had suffered in prison for polygamous cohabitation.Confused by the conflicting character of what leaders said and did, some Church members remarked that it seemed the Church was going in two directions at once.For the most part, however, inconsistencies diminished and fissures of disagreement between high churchmen over the question gradually closed. Officially approved new polygamous unions appear to have completely ceased by the time of World War I, and certainly by Smith’s death in 1918. 

III 

The rhetoric of heaven-approved deviance, an important historical theme in the Saints’ self-image and one to which plurality had powerfully contributed, never completely displaced the wish by many for respect from American society. This desire, combined with the Church’s official statements, moved followers closer to the American mainstream. It was what Utah Commissioner John A. McClernand referred to in an 1887 remark to President Grover Cleveland—that every time Mormons made a statement claiming polygamy was no longer a part of their way of life, the greater the likelihood that such a description would become true.Leo Lyman’s characterization of events during the 1880s aptly describes the process of change occurring in Mormonism after 1890 as well: “[Church] concessions …relating to polygamy [were] intended mainly to pacify the public and their elected representatives. The efforts at conciliation were done without actually altering any aspect of the practice, other than perhaps making it less visible and more of an individual responsibility. But each time a statement was made, Latter-day Saints who heeded the words of their ecclesiastical superiors were encouraged in their resolves not to practice polygamy.” 

Growing acceptance by the larger membership of the Church of claims by their leaders concerning plurality’s demise is the most significant alteration in Mormonism’s countenance from the late 1880s and into the twentieth century. The contention that no more than 1 or 2 percent of their members had ever lived in plural arrangements became a fixed characterization of Mor monism’s past, a generalization sincerely accepted as true by members and, increasingly, by leaders themselves. The low figures adduced by Church defenders, sometimes lifted to 5 or 10 percent, were given throughout the twentieth century, as in President Hinckley’s interview cited above.And as part of the changes taking place, encomiums bestowed on Abraham as a polygamous model fell silent. Church authorities increasingly insisted that the sealing of a monogamous couple in the temple was what the 1843 revelation required, not a man’s marriage to multiple wives.Contradicting the evidence of decades, polygamy was described by one high Church spokesman as never having been a “vital tenet” in Church teaching. It was no more than “an incident,” never an “essential” of what Mormonism taught. 

And with plurality’s diminished profile, fashion and idiom in Latter-day Saint communities increasingly resembled that of their Gentile neighbors. Writing early in the twentieth century, describing how the Church’s assumed discontinuance of polygamy trans formed life in Utah, one observer said: “Mormons and non-Mor mons [now] blend in the marts of trade, as in the ranks of the Bench and Bar, in the highways of travel, in society, in gatherings of all kinds, and only those who are acquainted could tell one from another.”The extent to which so many in the Church were brought to believe that God wanted Mormon men, at least in this world, to confine themselves to a single wife was one of Mormonism’s most defining turns. 

Because some dissenters yet held that polygamy was a binding requirement for the faithful and continued to enter such relationships, the First Presidency issued a harsh warning in 1933 to all who resisted the Church’s new course. The statement not only claimed that, in abandoning polygamy, Mormon leaders were conforming themselves to divine will but that further attempts to revive the Principle were inspired by Satan, that new plural relationships were adulterous, and that the president of the Church alone had authority to approve plural unions—permission he no longer granted.A further example of Mormonism’s monogamous inflection occurred when Utah’s state legislature enacted a criminal provision in 1935, supported by Church leaders, elevating conviction for polygamous cohabitation from a misdemeanor to a felony.Mormon assimilation of the monogamous ideal was carried to such an extent that the Church’s Commissioner of Education, Franklin L. West, whose father and grandfather were both devoted pluralists, told an audience of the faithful in 1937 that monogamy had proven itself superior in the experience of the race and that the one-wife system best harmonized with man’s inherent nature, the needs of families, and religious tradition. Embracing these views, the Saints had completely wheeled round, using arguments identical to those made by critics of Mormon plural marriage during the anti-polygamy crusade.Replacement of the Abrahamic polygamous ideal with firm Latter-day Saint endorsements of monogamy constitutes one of the most dramatic reversals in modern denominational history. 

IV 

Commitment to the Principle, however, was far from spent. Numbers of old modelers, nourished by Mormonism’s prodigious archive of polygamous commendation, were determined to keep plural marriage alive. It is a common pattern with ultra-orthodox dissenters to focus on a traditional tenet of the parent denomination, often one of distinguishing prominence, in this case Mormon polygamy, and to contend that repudiation of the precept occurred because of capitulation to secular influence. While most fundamentalists see official Mormonism as specially chosen in its youth, all consider it, in its maturity, to be a faith in peril. Replicating nineteenth-century Mormon indictments of Catholic and Protestant Christianity, Mormon fundamentalists accuse contemporary Latter-day Saints of no longer preaching the “fullness of the gospel,” of surrendering to the world, especially on account of their retreats from plural marriage.The fundamentalist shoots that sprouted from mainline Mormonism’s trunk in the nineteen-teens, twenties, and thirties grew directly from memories of the high importance given polygamy by the old Church and the decades-long refusal to surrender it. The concealed but Church-approved performance of such marriages that continued into the early twentieth century not only instanced the Principle’s endurance but provided encouragement to individuals committed to a fight that they saw others relinquishing. Official Mormonism’s post-Manifesto, covert involvement with plural marriage thus became a template for fundamentalist polygamy itself. 

Increasingly active numbers of irreconcilables met privately in each other’s homes, recalled the teachings of past leaders, and claimed that special authority for perpetuating polygamy was given them by Mormon President John Taylor when the Church was harassed and pressured to end the practice in the 1880s. As their following grew, several families relocated to the high desert lands of southern Utah and northern Arizona. There, the fundamentalist community of Short Creek, now grown to become the municipalities of Hildale and Colorado City, suffered periodic attacks from public agencies. The best-known of these was a government raid in 1953 by Arizona National Guardsmen under the direction of Arizona Governor Howard Pyle.The hardship created by the operation, combined with the exaggerations made to justify it and the financial costs incurred, led to a backlash in public opinion.Nearly all taken in the raid later returned to the locale, plural marriage continued to be taught, and satellite communities were established as far away as Canada, Mexico, and, more recently, at the “Yearning for Zion” ranch near El Dorado, Texas. Most importantly, consistent with the major contention of this article, since the 1953 raid the number living in polygamous households in these settlements has increased from hundreds to thousands.In 1991, considering themselves the authentic heirs of early Mormon preachment, the group officially named itself, “The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” (FLDS). 

Another sect, the Apostolic United Brethren, emerged in the mid-twentieth century on account of controversy over leadership succession in the movement. Predominantly urban, members of this persuasion do not follow an antique dress code but firmly adhere to the importance of plural marriage. Living chiefly in and around Salt Lake City, colonies of AUB partisans have spread to other locations in Utah, to Montana, and a few even to Mexico, Germany, and the Netherlands. AUB and FLDS organizations together now tally their communicants at nearly 20,000. Other smaller organizations also exist, each claiming special endorsement from on high. Additionally, hundreds of men and women, unassociated with any formal group, steadfastly adhere to the polygamous ideals extolled by former Latter-day Saint leaders and their writings. It is estimated that these independents actually constitute a majority of polygamous fundamentalists. Survey figures recently provided to me by Anne Wilde show organized and disparate adherents together totaling between 35,000 and 40,000 people, a substantial league of living advocates for the plural way of life.And all, refusing to see God’s hand in Mormonism’s doctrinal evolution, view the official Church’s opposition to plural marriage as evidence of its worldly thrall and oracular default. 

But even with their continuing increase, Mormon fundamentalists remain a slender troop when compared to the swelling legions of the better-known, monogamous, mainline Church. Grown to become one of the faster expanding religious bodies in the United States, counting more American adherents than either Episcopalians or Presbyterians, the Saints are now a formidable cultural force in certain regions of the country.And this—the impressive growth of monogamous Mormonism—constitutes a daunting riposte to any who would say that, by stepping aside from polygamy, Church leaders lost their way. Given its acquisitions of power, wealth, and influence, one can understand why Mormon authorities are disinclined to recall, much less reinstate, practices that once brought imprisonment and scorn. Still, the success that monogamous Latter-day Saints enjoy has not spared them irritation from claims by and public notice given to their polygamous cousins. Annoyed by their perseverance, the orthodox Church sharply enunciates differences between itself and the dissenters. Mormon authorities have vigorously sought to suppress fundamentalist activities by excommunication, loyalty oaths, cooperation with government officials in making arrests, refusing Church welfare assistance to fundamentalist families, and advising that their children be denied baptism into the parent, Salt Lake City denomination until old enough to denounce the practice that brought them into the world. 

In concert with these policies toward contemporary polygamous groups, Latter-day Saint authorities give, at most, only cursive attention to their own Church’s one-time commitment to plural marriage. Most approved biographies of early Mormon leaders say little, if anything, of their polygamous relationships. Almost no attention is given the subject in Latter-day Saint sermons, theological exposition, museum displays, or art.Properly memorializing the courage of Mormon pioneers in their struggle against persecution, official accounts largely avoid discussion of what it was they were often persecuted for: the preaching and practice of polygamy. Anxious to present their history as doctrinally seamless and their teachings as unchanging, leaders must gray recollection of the most aberrant feature of their Church’s past, cultivating what George D. Smith has termed “institutional forgetting.”When confronted with the impassioned advocacy of polygamy in the early Church, orthodox spokesmen call to their service exemptions permitted by “continuing revelation,” a dispensation that with its approval of doctrinal amendment necessarily qualifies confidence in their leaders’ prescience—as when President Heber J. Grant, condemning new plural marriages undertaken on the counsel of his predecessors, said “one living prophet [is] . . . worth twenty dead ones.” 

To be sure, there are still vestiges within the mainline denomination that remind one of the profound place plurality once occupied in Mormon belief. Most conspicuously, the 1843 revelation justifying plural marriage is still a part of the Church’s canon of scripture (D&C 132).Sublimating the Principle, it is sometimes said that, while the Church gave up the practice, it did not disavow the doctrine and that it will be implemented again in heaven.There is also the prospect, at odds with the Church’s opposition to the revival of plural relations in the present life, given to Latter-day Saint widowers who remarry women not al ready eternally promised to a former husband, that they—the widower, his deceased wife, and the new wife—may all live together as eternal companions in the world to come.And, though little noticed, the Church’s 1995 declaration, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” exalting marriage and emphasizing the divinely mandated presence of both genders in marital relations, when literally read fails to exclude polygamy as an acceptable form of family life.But these are anomalies, little diverting a Church now indefatigably crusading for the traditional, monogamous home. 

V 

In contrast to Mormonism’s opposition to renewed polygamy and to religious groups that espouse it, other developments suggest that the nation itself may be moving in a more generous direction, hinting at acceptance of what Latter-day Saint leaders would as soon forget. The much-publicized “Yearning for Zion” FLDS ranch in Texas, raided by state authorities in 2008, as at Short Creek, Arizona, in 1953, has seen many of its dislodged polygamous inhabitants peacefully return to their homes.While widespread American offense is aroused by the patriarchal authoritarianism of some of their leaders, the sentiment is by no means without exception, especially when it comes to the women, children and even the plural marital arrangement itself.On a different front, some recommend plural relationships as having advantages for the elderly. Because of actuarial differences between the genders, plurality offers greater opportunities for companionship to widowed and older women, providing a partial remedy for the loneliness encountered by both sexes in their later years.There is also now a non-religious website where single women seriously interested in joining polygamous families can advertise themselves.And success of the television series, Big Love, portraying not only the persistence but general workability of a polygamous family in modern life, suggests a growing lenience for the practice on the part of its viewing audience. 

Although courts consistently uphold statutes criminalizing polygamy, there is evidence that greater permissiveness may be looked for in the future. In words that would have pleased the ears of earlier Mormons, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s delphic forecast in 1971 that “in time Reynolds will be overturned,” if not yet realized, foretells changing constitutional scenery ahead.Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff deemphasizes prosecutions for polygamy as such, allowing fundamentalists to communicate less defensively with his office and thereby more effectively deter crimes such as under-age marriages and welfare fraud.A Republican legislator in Utah bravely, but unsuccessfully, proposed that the state apologize to its fundamentalist citizens.Canadians are examining the possibility of moderating their laws criminalizing plurality.And the growing assent for the legalization of same-sex marriage both in the United States and abroad portends a more relaxed attitude generally toward marital relationships of many kinds between consenting adults— including plural wifery. 

The possibility that this shift in attitude may eventually become dominant raises the question of official Mormonism’s response. Is it conceivable that the main body of the Saints could return to the much-married, grandly multiplied patriarch as an ideal this side of the veil? Admitting, as Michael Quinn suggests, that the growth of Mormon membership among peoples in third world countries where polygamy is practiced could lead the Church to a revised interpretation of the Manifesto, my own expectation is that this will not soon occur.I am also certain that, until sentiment within the United States becomes yet more permissive on social issues, jealous of its improving public image the official Church will not hazard so reactionary a course.Mor monism’s “passion for respectability,” long frustrated by its polygamous reputation, is not yet fully sated.Although, without re turning to the practice, it is reasonable to assume that, so far as respectful forbearance of polygamy’s presence among others is concerned, consistent with its altered stands on controversial subjects before, we can eventually expect to see Mormonism “backing,” as Klaus Hansen put it, “into the future.” 

But this will most easily happen when leaders turn from obsession with the Mormon past as a proselytizing tool to an honest regard for its instructive potential.An instance is found in one of the Church’s responses when the nation’s attack on its marriage practices became most intense in the 1870s and 80s. Departing from earlier policies, Church spokesmen began softening their censure of monogamy and took a broader, more pliant stance. While contending that plural marriage was the better way, and one that in all its requirements could be lived best only by Mormons themselves, inasmuch as polygamy and monogamy had existed together in other places, they observed, why not again—as, indeed, it did in Utah Territory at the time? Mormon polygamy, they pointed out, did not in fact endanger monogamy. So why not permit polygamy to be tried as an experiment, they asked, and then, based on observed effects, allow men and women freely to choose which marital philosophy to embrace? By showing no preference for a particular form of marriage in its laws, they argued, government would be “more complete and glorious . . . [permitting] the widest diversity in . . . social habits and institutions, as well as in religious faith.”As an increasingly respected convert to the nation’s monogamous bias, but one knowing the wrath of those opposed to an unpopular social philosophy, a more liberally inclined Mormon ism could plead an easing of society’s penalty-laden policies toward modern pluralists, summon its one-time prayer for the coexistence of differing domestic systems, and anoint tolerance as a favored response to those different from itself. 

Beyond its relevance for relations with others, more open inquiry into the Church’s polygamous past can bring special treasures to the mainline faithful themselves. As an organization claiming hallowed regard for early fathers and mothers, we should expect nothing less from the Saints than forthright accounts of those who courageously strove to do “the works of Abraham,” multiplying wives and children on the promise that by so doing they were bringing greater radiance to their future estates.If the family structure for which they toiled was set aside by a later generation, it does not diminish their immeasurable sacrifices in its behalf. Such lives are ill requited when accounts of what they believed in and died for are abridged. If Mormonism with its adherence to continuing revelation changed course, it does not disqualify the reverence owing men and women who, in their day, hearing a different call, followed a different fur row—one that they were promised would bring a greater harvest. The ancient Greeks sometimes went abroad to recover the bones of their heroes and wise men so as to give them an honorable place at home. It is said that their oracles told them that to do so would bless and prosper their native lands.By more fully restoring the lives of polygamous pioneers to Mormonism’s collective memory, Latter-day Saints will further venerate an already noble heritage. 

VI 

In a 1930 essay marking the centennial of Mormonism’s birth, Bernard DeVoto described the Church as a “tamed heresy.” However tamed and congruent this best-known native faith has become, its best-known heresy survives. More than only threads in modern Latter-day Saint scripture and ritual, or as the subject of socio-historical investigation and cinematic portrayal, Mormon plural marriage is most visible in the lengthening rosters of contemporary, protesting fundamentalists. And these separatists, convinced that heaven is on their side, may be engaged in nothing less than the birthing of a new religion. Following the church/ sect declension familiar to all students interested in the sociology of religion, modern polygamy’s disciples present us with behaviors that not only commonly attend the founding of new faiths but ones that replicate Mormonism’s own beginnings: claims of di vine approval for their dissenting path; adherence to unpopular social constructions; and the cobbling of liturgical usages from what they see as the detritus of an errant predecessor.If not yet fully coalescent in an institutional sense, Mormonism’s polygamous, fundamentalist strands, as with Catholicism’s dissevering reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, follow religious compasses that share a common doctrinal north. 

In conversations over many years, I often heard that plural marriage would inevitably be given up and left to fade from the historical consciousness of the Saints. Though a major relinquishment, it was said, this was a predictable outcome of the Church’s inclining, assimilationist arc. I am now convinced that, when considered in its entirety, including its perpetuation by today’s fundamentalists, larger Mormonism’s experience with the practice suggests a different conclusion. Given plurality’s deep intertwining with the Church’s restorationist, family expansionist theology, the Prophet Joseph Smith’s determined commitment to polygamy’s implementation, the earnest arguments made by his followers in its defense, and the considerable number of men, women, and children who lived in the system, valiantly defying U.S. law for decades to preserve it, there was set to work a powerful, replicating momentum. 

Contemporary standard bearers of the plural way, inheritors of the early Church’s theological justifications and tradition of resistance, obstinately adhere to the Principle. Building their lives around a marital ideal once exalted by the parent creed as a labarum, then folded and put away, these modern votaries proudly herald its colors once more. Merging polygamous fundamentalism’s resilient course with the pattern of Latter-day Saint plural marriage generally, a recent observer concluded: “So many times in the history of Mormon polygamy the outside world thought it had the movement on the ropes only to see it flourish anew.” The Church’s greatest heresy, succored from its earliest days by the faith and sacrifice of Mormonism’s best, despite all trials and abandonments stubbornly continues to reemerge, recruiting eager Abrahams and Jacobs again and again.